In the painting “The Jewish Rider,” R.B. Kitaj presents the Jew as a traveler. The train moves through a barren landscape and passes a cross and a chimney, symbolizing Christianity and Jewish suffering respectively.

The picture depicts the notion of the modern diasporist, for whom the state of being on the road is intellectually and emotionally appropriate, but it also refers to the Holocaust and its means of transport. A brief note in the artist’s papers reveals the conceptual beginnings of the painting: “Poland—Auschwitz (Poland)—J. Rider.”

The traveler’s pose evokes Rembrandt’s Polish Rider in a lonely landscape. The rider here present in Kitaj’s painting is his friend Michael Isaac Podro (1931-2008), the British art historian.

In the early 1970s R.B. Kitaj began to focus intensively on his own Jewishness. His “Jewish obsession” became a key dimension of his art, and prompted him to redefine his older works. A Jewish or Diasporist art was intended to give shape to the experience of exile and dissidence, and to develop a singularly Jewish iconography.

"My friend Michael Podro posed for this painting and its few associated drawings off and on over the course of about one year. It is based, of course, on Rembrandt's Polish Rider, my favourite picture in the Frick Collection.

Unlike Rembrandt's masterpiece, there is no mystery about who posed for me or where he's going. My Rider, I believe, is on his way to visit the sites of the Death Camps in Poland, many years after the war. I was inspired by a report someone wrote, who rode a train from Budapest to Auschwitz to see what the doomed souls might have seen. He said the countryside was beautiful. I also sketched in a memory, a memento mori of the original horse. Along the right is the red carpeted corridor, and at its top is The Gentile Conductor (as a power of darkness). Jews were often made to buy tickets on the trains which would carry them to their murder. I think Podro and I appreciated our Diasporist chats when we were making this picture together."